The Cure emerges from grief to show Primavera its most festive side

BarcelonaThe Cure's return to the stage, after a year and a half break, showed them in a very different incarnation from their previous visit to the Palau Sant Jordi, in November 2022. At that time they were presenting the album Songs of a lost world, marked by the death of the parents and a brother of the band's leader, Robert Smith. The group has also lost guitarist and keyboardist Perry Bamonte, who died in December. Despite this accumulation of loss, The Cure, who triumphantly took the main stage at Primavera Sound as headliners this Friday, left all that grief behind to offer their most festive and festival-ready repertoire, with a very generous selection of singles, out of the fifty they have released in almost half a century of existence.

It was a long concert, a trademark of the band, lasting two and a half hours. Eden Gallup, son of bassist Simon Gallup – the longest-serving member by far, besides the singer himself – took over Bamonte's duties, as he has done on occasion in cases of temporary absences, but they have not announced whether his incorporation will now be as a full member of The Cure. The band sounded as always: compact and winning, with songs honed in a thousand concerts, although Smith always knows how to give them a playful twist thanks to a voice that remains intact despite nearing seventy. Eighties classics like The walk, Let’s go to bed, Play for today, and The lovecats were sung along to by the audience, not just the sung parts, but also the instrumental ones. That was The Cure in its most lololo version. And it worked. 

These desires to mark a festival profile led to, although since the release of the last album they had already announced that they had recorded material to release another album of a similar tone, the group did not take advantage of this return to premiere any of them, as a taste. There were gestures for the most hardened fans, such as rescuing 2 late, which was the B-side of Love song, and which they had not played since 2019. Mint car, alt.end, and Wrong numberwhich dispenses with usual pedals such as the Hot, hot, hot!!!, which dispenses with common pedals like flanger or chorus in favor of more natural, less atmospheric riffs. After all, on the next Rolling Stones album there is a collaboration with Robert Smith that reinforces this taste for pure rock.

"I will lose myself in time, it won’t be long" ("I will lose myself in time, it won’t be long"). These are verses from the song Endsong with which the group's last album closes, one of the most heartbreaking songs they have ever written and which served to close the main block of the performance, before the encores, which included Friday, i'm in love, Close to me and Boys don't cry. Judging by the euphoric shout "I hope to see you soon!" with which he said goodbye and also the announced preparations to celebrate the band's 50th anniversary in 2028, everything suggests that Smith and company feel stronger to continue defending their legacy than the lyrics might suggest.

From industry to the avant-garde

Hours earlier, the also veteran Einstürzende Neubauten filled the Auditorium stage with all the junk that usually accompanies these postmodern luthiers. Although they are no longer that industrial sonic assault that scared the neighborhood cats with their squeaks, this more controlled and avant-garde version of the German group remains intense and contains its own grammar full of interesting sounds. A touching and comical moment was when the leader, Blixa Bargeld, grandly presented the supermarket trolley with which they would later perform Grazer Damm: he explained that the 1984 one was already too rusty. And since the new one must have had a GPS chip inside, as he recounted, someone from New Zealand must have been wondering how on earth that stolen trolley had ended up so far away. 

The concert served to introduce the new group member, Josefine Lukschy, who replaces the historic Alexander Hacke, with over 40 years of career in the group. They were not easy shoes to fill, because in Neubauten the bass line is the essential cushion that allows all the metallic percussions of the rest of the band and Bargeld's iconic shrieks to be built upon it. But she graduated with honors and received the loudest applause of the afternoon. The concert drew mainly from their latest albums and worked very well because it is in live performances that the body of their music is best appreciated. Bargeld was happy, even euphoric, and dedicated a song to his trans son, encouraging the audience to rebel against biological determinism. 

Another highlight of the day was the performance by the Swedish band Viagra Boys. Their wild rock deliberately wallows in aesthetics – singer Sebastian Murphy is a poem in himself – but the band is incredibly tight and, at the same time, can afford jams like the one in the final track, Research chemicals, with which they turned this ode to a bad trip into an explosion of paranoid notes that lasted a quarter of an hour thanks to the free jazz solo by saxophonist Oskar Carls. In keeping with the political charge of their lyrics, which are both delirious and sarcastic, there was an applauded anti-fascist exhortation and shouts in favor of Palestine. The performance time felt short even though it ended at four in the morning and there was great excitement among the audience with classics like Troglodyte, Ain’t no thief and Man made of meat. Of course, fewer people reached the end of the concert than started it: it wasn't two minutes before security personnel kindly invited any audience member with flying tendencies to leave the venue.